


Left Behind

by astudyinpanda



Category: XCOM (Video Games) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Interrogation, Medical Procedures, Original Character(s), Psionics, Psychological Torture, XCOM 2 - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-19
Updated: 2017-06-19
Packaged: 2018-11-16 02:12:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11244198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astudyinpanda/pseuds/astudyinpanda
Summary: Commander, do you really want to abandon that soldier on the battlefield? This is what might happen to him if you do.





	Left Behind

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in an early stage of XCOM 2, prior to XCOM weapons advancements.

The ranger laughed, and _fuck_ did that hurt, but he laughed anyway. It was, from the right perspective, a damned funny situation. A damned funny way to die.

Objective complete, the squad had been moving to evac, relinquishing the field to the enemy. The ranger had kept up, but the stun trooper had been faster. It'd only taken one hit to drop the ranger to his knees, muscles locking against the electricity, nerves screaming louder than he did.

His squadmates finished the fucker off, but reinforcements were coming and their transport couldn't wait. He'd been too dizzy to stand, let alone run, but he could fire a few rounds in their pursuers' general direction, hold them off for a while. Somebody ought to survive all of this, and it wasn't looking like that would be him.

He couldn't take a full breath if he wanted to, and it hurt too much to try. So now he half sat, half collapsed against the remains of a brick wall at the edge of an old parking lot, not ten steps from where the transport was leaving. He couldn't have made it in time. But Izzy, and Marquez, and Stub, and those other beautiful jackasses in his squad… They were going back to the Avenger.

The rifle in his hands clicked dry. He let his arms fall. His hands opened when they hit the sun-baked pavement, and the weapon slid out of them. He'd been firing on adrenaline and rage, and as the last pair of boots thumped into the Avenger's Skyranger and evac cable retracted, his adrenaline drained away. The transport rose in a cloud of whirling dust. The remaining ADVENT troops focused on him.

He hadn't left a bullet for himself. He laughed again, and damn the pain. It was a certain kind of funny.

 One of the ADVENT grunts stepped up beside him and kicked his rifle out of reach. The ranger turned his head to watch the weapon skid across the pavement, the metallic scraping audible under the retreating Skyranger's engine. The ADVENT soldier bent over him and flipped the ranger face first into the pavement, and that hurt like hell. The grunt cuffed the ranger's wrists behind him, pulling his aching chest tight, and patted him down through gloves so thick the ranger was surprised that the guy was able to find the two blades he did.

The ADVENT officer said something to the grunt in that creepy, multi-tonal voice they had. This was the closest the ranger had ever heard one that wasn't screaming while it died. The language sounded wet, and alien, and he was going to hear a lot more of it, he guessed.

The grunt stepped away from the ranger, and the officer pressed a button at his -- its? -- temple. "What is your name." Their voice pitch never rose when they asked questions. Maybe all of their human languages were pre-recorded, and the words had to sound right in any order they were delivered.

The ranger craned his neck to look at the officer without jamming his chin into the dirt. These ugly fuckers didn't need to call him anything. The grunt raised his weapon, and it occurred to the ranger that he might have a chance to survive, if he acted like he had something to say. If he made himself look like too much of a hardass, they'd realize they couldn't get any intel out of him and kill him now. Just one more body to incinerate, or recycle, or whatever they did with their own dead.

"I'm called Texas." Tex, to the people of XCOM. The ADVENT soldiers didn't even try to smile at the nickname. Maybe they didn't get the joke. They might not know where that state was, and they'd probably never watched an episode of _Walker, Texas Ranger_. They probably hated the idea of an Earth that their kind never invaded.

"Get up, Texas," the officer said. Tex couldn't help smirking at that name coming out of that fat alien mouth.

Pulling himself to his knees did something nasty to Tex's insides, and he froze. He couldn't arch his back against the pain because the stun trooper that knocked him down had pumped a hell of a lot of electricity into his chest. The muscles felt torn from the bone. And while Tex had been dragging himself away from the trooper, a particle beam shot had blazed through his lower back. A few inches to the right and it would've missed him completely. An inch higher and it would've gone into armor. But no, some alien/human/asshat hybrid had to be _precise_.

The officer didn't make him keep trying to stand. He said something to the grunt, who grabbed Tex under the arms and hauled him upright, ignoring his pained growl. A press of a rifle barrel against his armor, above the wound in his back, communicated "walk" more efficiently than the ADVENT grunt would've been able to speak the word.

Tex stumbled, but he walked on his own. Blood from the wound in his back ran over his ass and into his pant leg. He'd been dizzy when he went down, and he'd hoped it was just from not taking deep enough breaths, thanks to his messed-up chest. Now it was looking like blood loss was his bigger problem. His mouth hung slightly open as his body begged him for more oxygen. That helped reduce the stench, too. Dead alien hybrids didn't smell any better than dead humans.

On TV, ADVENT loaded prisoners into black vans. They didn't bring one of those into this abandoned stretch of suburbia, but they did have short-hop air transport. The officer climbed in first and turned to drag Tex in after him. With his hands still cuffed behind him, Tex hit the cabin floor in a clatter of armor and a pained groan. The world faded to black.

 

 

When the light came back, it was green, and everywhere. It dug into his eyes until he shut them again. Something bound his arms to his sides. Something else pressed against his face. A mask. And all around him there was a semi-liquid substance, thicker than water. He kicked at it, weakly, and the green light went away. So did everything else.

 

 

Faint whirring and an antiseptic smell woke him. He lay on a hard surface, cold as ice. For long moments, he felt suspended there, as if he _could_ move, but he didn't want to. Then he inhaled and the inside of his throat scraped over something, and he couldn't move after all because thick metal cuffs held his forearms, shins, and head in place. His heart pounded like someone was shooting at him. Hard plastic was in his mouth and down his throat, and his gasping breath sounded hollow and strange.

With his head clamped to the surface beneath him, his field of vision was too narrow to show much. The room felt large and dark, lit only by the status lights on the machines around him. The whirring was coming from those. At the edge of his peripheral vision he made out a flat metal bed, raised to the height of a counter, or maybe an operating table. The one under him was probably similar. He didn't see any doctors or nurses.

"Hey!" The plastic in his mouth muffled his yell, but the way his voice reverberated slightly confirmed that this was a fairly large room. "Hey!" He couldn't exactly say anything else around what he was beginning to suspect was a plastic tube in his throat, connected to one of the nearby machines. Who knew how far into him it went, or what it was delivering? He shuddered.

His back and chest ached. Although he couldn't look down, he felt air moving over the burn over his ribs. That was possible, he realized with a bit more deeply uncomfortable squirming, because he wasn't wearing his armor, or a single shred of clothing. He bit down on the plastic in his mouth. It barely moved under the pressure.

The mission. They'd completed the objective, but he'd been shot. And his squad had left him behind. It was the only way the rest of them would've escaped. And now ADVENT had him.

 _One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand._ Counting seconds usually helped him get his breathing under control. It was the only thing he could control, at this point. It took almost three minutes to calm down enough to confirm that he could move his fingers and toes. At least he wasn't paralyzed, so far. He strained against the metal cuffs, but none of them budged. The insides of his elbows ached like he had needles in his veins, so he must've been hooked up to IVs.

He lay on the metal bed for hours. The temperature remained cool, and the machines' persistent white whirring noise filled his ears like cotton. The burns on his chest and back heated up as time passed. If he'd been given painkiller before he woke up, it was wearing off. Sweat beaded on his forehead as the pain level rose. All he could do was stay as still as he could and hope it didn't get as bad as it had been right after he got shot, because that—

A door slid open somewhere in the room, and a small white light, like a flashlight, played over the wall beside him. Two sets of footsteps entered. One sounded like a person walking across tile, but the other… Bare feet padded across a hard floor in an alien cadence he recognized as a sectoid's. He swallowed convulsively, which dragged his throat across the plastic again, and he had to fight the urge to puke. The footsteps stopped beside his bed, the sectoid's a few steps before the person.

The plastic between Tex's teeth shifted, and then white light shone down into his eyes and he shut them with an annoyed grunt. The tube moved in him again, and then it was dragging up his throat and out of his mouth. It was ribbed, and he felt every one of them. It didn't hurt, exactly, but it was fucking weird and this person's bedside manner needed some damned work.

The plastic triggered his gag reflex, and the clamp on his head released just in time for him to turn his head to the side and throw up all over his shoulder and the side of the metal table he lay on. There wasn't much solid in the mess. He hadn't eaten anything since he left the Avenger. The person sighed, an exasperated, feminine sound, and the light left his face.

The woman wore a white doctor's coat and a small light strapped to her forehead, which allowed her to see what she was doing without inconveniencing the sectoid. XCOM scientists said sectoids needed much less light to see by than humans did. Her face was dark and her eyes, when they glanced his way while she wiped vomit off his skin and the bed, were normal, human sized ones, not the hybrid's big sectoid monstrosities. Behind her, the actual sectoid just stared at him, breathing loudly enough to hear over the machines whirring around them.

"Where…" His throat hurt, which made all kinds of sense given what it'd gone through, and it was too dry to really talk much, but he forced the words out as best he could. "Where are we?"

The doctor turned the light on his face again, and he squinted up at her, but the light shifted away again and refocused on one of the IV bags beside him. She did something to it, then stepped away from the bed without answering him. A cold, tingling sensation spread up his arm from the crook of his elbow. There was something new in his IV. "What the hell is that?" he croaked. The doctor backed further away from him instead of answering.

The sectoid stepped closer. It leaned over him, and its black eyes locked with his. He could _smell_ the creature, a scent between must and piss and the air right after a plasma bolt passed through it. The sectoid raised one of its boney hands, fast, like it was aiming a slap at his face, although it stopped before it actually hit him. Purple energy crackled in its palm, raising every hair on the back of his neck. The faint ozone odor reminded Tex of the stun baton that'd gotten him into this situation.

A short, low hum felt like it punched straight into Tex's brain. It hurt like nothing he'd felt before for a long, horrible moment, but he'd barely started to scream before the pain just… Disappeared. All of it, head to toe.

He was standing in the barracks on the Avenger. Which wasn't right, he wasn't there, he was in some ADVENT facility in the ass end of Arizona. Except everything he saw, felt, and heard was on the Avenger. Sleeping soldiers just back from a mission somewhere else, the engine rumble, the sort of slept-in stuffiness the room got after the airship had been on the ground for a few days. The edges of his vision were fuzzy.

_LEAVE THIS ROOM._

The order didn't arrive in words, but he understood it anyway. He turned toward the door and stopped. _The sectoid._ It was seeing what he saw, or what he remembered seeing. It wanted a tour of the ship, from inside his skull.

"Go to hell," he said aloud.

  ** _LEAVE THIS ROOM._**

The order hit him like a sledge hammer behind his eyes. The edges of the room sharpened and there was nothing, nothing in the world he wanted more than to get out of the damned barracks, to be anywhere else. He took a step forward and tried to stand still at the same time, which dropped him to an ungainly half kneel on the metal tiles. None of the other soldiers reacted to his sudden inability to walk, or to him breathing like he'd just finished the last five minutes of a treadmill marathon.

He was in full gear. His knife was in his boot. He gripped its handle and struggled to his feet despite his intention to stay down. He took a step toward the door, then another, and then buried the blade in his own neck.

The barracks disappeared, and, thank God, the knife did too. He lay on his back in the dark medical room again. All of the pain of his injuries came back at once, with a new, excruciating headache on top. He felt himself screaming before his hearing returned.

The sectoid was screaming too, that high pitched gargling noise they made when he put a bullet in them. They both stopped at the same time. _Freaky._

Tex grinned at it. "I always have that knife. Can't imagine myself without it."

The sectoid's hand came up again, and Tex was back in the barracks. Only now, all of the soldiers were dead, smashed and blasted to pieces all over the beds, the walls, the floor. And a muton stood with its back to him in the middle of the carnage.

Izzy's arm lay on the floor beside her bed. The only way he recognized it as hers was by the woven bracelet on her wrist. Her body was just pulverized meat. In the bunk above, Marquez's face was caved in and his brain leaked over the side. Stub, the poor bastard, looked like he'd tried to fight back, and the muton had torn him in half, from neck to navel.

Tex must've made some kind of noise, because the muton's head came up. It turned slowly, like in a dream, and Tex was rooted to the spot in the middle of the barracks. He didn't have his shotgun. If he tried to take the muton on in close quarters like this, he'd end up like Stub.

_RUN._

All of a sudden, Tex could move again. He stumbled backwards and slapped the door controls without looking at them, and then he was in the hall outside the barracks, running like hell. If the muton had killed everybody in the barracks, then the Avenger was overrun. Far behind him, the barracks door opened and the muton roared. He had to get out, all the way out. If they were still in Arizona, there was a resistance haven he could get to. Maybe.

He was almost to the Avenger's ramp when he skidded to a stop. The edges of his vision were blurry again, and this wasn't right. He hadn't made it back to the Avenger. He'd gotten shot and stayed behind, so the rest of his squad could survive.

And the sectoid didn't want to look around the Avenger after all. It wanted to make him show it where the Arizona haven was.

He bent to reach for the knife in his boot, but the muton had followed him, and honestly, that seemed easier. As its fists came down toward his head, he shut his eyes.

The dark medical room reappeared around, with machines beeping loudly, and everything _hurt,_ especially his head. The mother of all migraines was cracking his skull apart from the inside, and all the beeping and the sectoid's shriek was making it worse. Maybe a muton really had hit him in the head.

The doctor said something, and the sectoid hissed in reply. The beeping stopped, after a while, and then they both walked out of his field of vision, taking the doctor's bright headlight with them. They hadn't clamped his head down and he turned it to follow them. Her backward glance blinded him with the light for a second. "Help me," he pleaded through gritted teeth. The light turned left and right a couple of times as she shook her head 'no.' It vanished through a door that shut behind them. A lock slid into place with a discouragingly heavy clack.

He was alone again, and hurting like hell.

 

 

Day after day, the two of them came back to drug Tex and force him through hallucinations of the Avenger being overrun. Sometimes the muton had killed everyone. Sometimes Stub was still alive, and begging Tex to get him to a doctor. Sometimes it was Marquez, or Izzy, or a soldier from another squad, one of the officers, even the commander once or twice. Every time so far he'd recognized that the scenario wasn't real, eventually. But he was running further and further from the imaginary Avenger every time, closer and closer to the resistance haven.

And every time, he came back to reality in the medical room, in the dark, with a headache that made him want to die.

He couldn't keep fighting them forever. Eventually the sectoid would figure out the scenario he'd believe, and he'd show them exactly where to find the resistance haven. He knew that, now. Given enough time, they'd find a way to break him. All he could do was hold out for as long as he could.

It felt like it went on for weeks, although he couldn't be sure. They fed him intravenously, so he couldn't count meals, and sometimes he passed out after a session with the sectoid. His wounds healed, but the doctor and the sectoid never let him off the table.

In the long hours when he was alone with the machines and the dark, he worried that if they ever did let him up, he wouldn't remember how to walk. Or, worse, he would, and he'd walk straight to that resistance haven like they kept trying to make him do in the hallucinations. Or the first time he suspected that the world around him was another hallucination, he'd stab himself for real. Wouldn't that be a hell of a way to go.

 

 

And then, one day or night -- he had no way to tell -- the doctor came in alone, with a big metal cart. Light blinded him as she approached his table. She left the cart near the door, he guessed, because he didn't hear its wheels coming closer.

"Changed your mind about helping me?" Hopeless as the question was, he had to ask.

"Yes. I did."

Tex opened his eyes wide, despite the bright light. He hoped, hell he prayed, that he knew what this was, that this was really happening. The doctor had gone to the machines beside the table and was changing settings on them, the same way she usually did when she came in with the sectoid.

"If you want to help, then let me up," Tex suggested. If that was the game she wanted to play, he could play along.

"Oh. Yes." She pressed a button on the machine she was looking at, and the metal clamps around Tex's arms and legs snapped open.

Tex took a deep breath and, for the first time in weeks, sat up. He ached, but he could manage it. "What changed your mind?"

The doctor turned her headlamp on him and he shut his eyes against it. "It wasn't right, what they… What _we_ were doing to you." Her headlamp turned toward his uncovered crotch. _Ah, shit, the catheters,_ he realized about a second before she pulled them out. When he was finished swearing, she said, "The others they take, they take away from here. You, they kept here for… too long."

"Got that right," Tex said. So, it was fine to let aliens fuck with people's brains for a little while, but wrong to drag it out? Some rescuer she was.

It was time for him to bite the bullet and try to stand up. He wouldn't know if he could until he tried. He eased his legs over the side of the table until his feet hit bare floor, and gingerly put weight on them until he wasn't sitting on the table anymore. His legs wobbled a bit, but they held him. His sigh of relief sounded loud over the machinery. "Okay, doc. What's the plan to get me out of here?"

"There is a specimen bag on that cart by the door." Her headlamp highlighted it like a spotlight. The black cloth on top was about the right size for a body bag. "Please get into the bag, and--"

"Whoa, hang on," said Tex, "I'm really not liking any plans that involve me lying around naked in a bag. Have you seen my weapons? My gear?" This could still be some kind of trick, and he'd feel a lot better going into a trap -- or a bag -- if he were armed.

The light waved back and forth as she shook her head. "Your things were gone when we began… working with you."

Which, to Tex, sounded like 'torture is just a collaborative project, as long as it only happens for a short time!' He rubbed the bridge of his nose, and his fingers came away greasy. "Well, I don't have a better idea. And after that?"

The doctor finished whatever she was doing with the machine and walked briskly to the cart, taking the light with her. "The bag will be loaded into a van, which will take you to a location which my resistance contact selected. I don't know where it is. The people in the van won't know that you are… healthy. So please, just get into the bag and remain there until somebody opens it. The longer we stay here, the more likely it is that my supervisor will wonder where I am and come looking for me."

The thing Tex liked about that plan, he reflected as he climbed into the bag, was that nobody had to know where the resistance contact was coming from. Tex wouldn't even be able to see where he was at any given time. And if something went wrong along the way, he could improvise. Violently.

The doctor leaned over the cart to zip the bag over his head, but he said, "Wait. What happens to you after all this is done?"

She frowned and turned the light on his face for a moment before she zipped the bag closed. "I have a different escape plan."

The cart lurched over the door's threshold and trundled along over what sounded like a bare floor. "Good," said Tex. "And... Thanks, for this." Not for the rest of it, but the rescue, he appreciated.

A few ID readers pinged, but nobody stopped the doctor and her specimen cart. It wasn't until some guys had helped her load his specimen bag into a vehicle and shut the doors that he realized he'd never seen her face.

In the hallucinations, he'd seen every soldier's face clearly. He'd also seen the sectoid in every nasty detail. She'd had the light on at all times. It was natural that he hadn't seen it. But was he thinking that himself, or was the sectoid making him think that? The inside of the bag was as dark as the room where he'd been held. How could he prove that this was real?

He also remembered the beginning of the sessions with the sectoid, though, and this time the doctor had definitely come in alone. There hadn't ever been this sensation of motion in the hallucinations, and he'd definitely never hallucinated he was stuffed into a bag. This had to be real. Didn't it?

Sometime later, the vehicle stopped and doors opened behind his head. He stayed still right up until three silenced pistol shots popped somewhere behind him. As he struggled against the bag's zipper, two solid thuds of bodies hitting the floor followed. Just as he'd feared, something was going wrong and he was trapped in this goddamned bag.

Somebody unzipped the top of it enough for him to get his arms through, then stumbled back laughing as Tex threw a wild punch that missed. "Oh yeah, that's him all right."

It was Stub. That was his voice for sure. Tex twisted around to look out the back of a van's double doors. In a parking garage's orange overhead lights, his whole squad stood waiting for him, armed to the teeth. Two dead ADVENT hybrids lay at their feet, in spreading pools of blood. Stub was in front, and Izzy stood grinning beside him, holding one of the pistols. Marquez had the other. The rest of the soldiers were looking around the van or back toward the bright square of daylight near the entrance to the garage, watching for trouble.

"God damn, am I happy to see you people," Tex said.

"Better be!" said Izzy. "Now get out of there and let's go. And take some of these guys' clothes. We've got a long way to go to get to the evac point, and you're going to look funny walking down the block naked."

Stub had to give him a hand climbing out of the back of the van, but once Tex was standing and dressed in his dead enemies' clothes, he was feeling well enough to run, if he had to. The hybrids hadn't been armed, so Tex wouldn't be either. He wouldn't have told any of his squadmates, but for once in his life he was glad not to be carrying a knife.

His peripheral vision was clear, without any of the hallucination's blurry edges. This was real. He was going back to the Avenger. This time, they'd all make it to the evac point.


End file.
